“A Nobel laureate in physics, Arthur Compton, wrote the introduction for this work. By 1968 Charles Eames and his wife, Ray, produced a documentary, Powers of Ten based on that book. MIT physics professor, Philip Morrison, narrated the movie and with his wife, Phyllis, they wrote a book, Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding another Zero (1982).

NASA and Caltech maintain a website that keeps Boeke’s original work alive and now people have expanded and corrected Boeke’s work.

There is the on-going work of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University; they give Boeke credit for inspiring their effort called “Secret Worlds: The Universe Within.”

Just fourteen-years old at the time they initiated their online work, genetic twins Cary and Michael Huang developed a most colorful online presentation that opens the study of scientific notation to a young audience. The concepts were widely popularized with the 1996 production of Cosmic Voyage by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for their 150th anniversary (the 20th for the museum). With IMAX distribution and Morgan Freeman as the narrator, many more people are experiencing the nature of scientific notation.

Yet, the work within base-ten scientific notation has not had consistent limits. Most of this work starts at the human scale and goes inside the small-scale universe and stops well-short of the Planck length. Going out to the large-scale universe, the limit was generally-accepted measurement of the observable universe at that time. More on calculations…